- Sanya Jovanovic
I look at my twelve-year-old, and I think, now what?
She is at that volatile age where every little thing can set her off. Recently, we were at a birthday party where the adults were upstairs, and the kids were downstairs in the basement. When I went down to check on them, I found her looking completely gloomy, pulling her jacket tight around herself.
Her posture immediately told me this wasn’t just typical moody hormones.
My 12-year-old daughter was sitting alone in a corner, her eyes staring somewhere far away, even though she was glued to her phone screen
The only reason she even has a phone is for safety — so she can walk home from school by herself, or for days like this when she is out with her friends.
The rest of the time, that phone is hidden away somewhere in the house. But there she was, hiding behind the screen, completely closed off. When we got home that night, she just brushed me off. I didn’t want to pressure her, so I let it go.
But the next morning, as I was driving her to school, a new, unsettling detail emerged.
The soundtrack of disillusionment
We share a Spotify playlist, and she loves to share her music with me in the car. Suddenly, some of the songs that had started entering the picture were things that honestly shouldn’t resonate with a twelve-year-old.
The one that became a part of our morning routine was a track called “Snow White” by Laufey. The lyrics that caught my attention were devastating: “The girl’s best currency is her body, not her brain.” “The world is a sick place, at least for a girl.”
Hearing those words come out of the speakers while looking at my passenger seat was a punch to the gut. We are talking about a twelve-year-old girl who is on her way to a choir scholarship. She is deeply into piano and has a highly developed ear; give her a couple of hours with a song she hears, and she can play the notes perfectly on the keys.
Swimming lessons, Sunday church school — you name it, she does it. She dreams of becoming an architect. She has this incredible mind and so much substance. Yet, on the ride to school, the song she was connecting with told her that none of her talent mattered. That her only real value to the world was physical.
Around that same time, I noticed another change: she suddenly started wearing oversized hoodies, constantly clamping them tight to her body. It was a subtle but telling shift, a physical manifestation of a discomfort she couldn’t yet articulate.
From childhood to template
It would be weeks before she finally found the words to tell me what actually happened in that basement. But in the meantime, the puzzle pieces of a much larger cultural trap kept forcing themselves into our daily lives.
The pressure isn’t just coming from her headphones; it’s coming from the storefronts. A couple of days after the birthday party, she looked at me with genuine confusion and asked, “All of my friends have this serum. Why don’t you want to buy me this from Sephora?”
I remember looking back at her and thinking: “You’re twelve. If this is the norm now, what on earth are you going to need when you’re seventeen or eighteen?”
Until recently, I had never even heard the phrase “Sephora Kids.” Then I discovered it had become shorthand for a growing trend of preteens buying expensive, anti-aging skincare and beauty products originally marketed to adults.
Expensive hardly seems like the right word. A single lip gloss can cost over $30.
Long before many girls have had the chance to discover who they are, they are already being encouraged to perfect how they look. The line between childhood and adulthood is no longer simply fading; it is being pushed further and further back.
And when our young girls look ahead at the world they are being rushed into, the destination is incredibly uniform. I see it every time I walk into stores like Sephora or Aritzia and notice something I can’t seem to unsee.
Many of the young women working there are stunning. But what strikes me isn’t their beauty; it’s how remarkably similar they often look: The same perfectly sculpted eyebrows. The same dramatic eyelashes. The same contoured makeup. Perfect nails, the hair blowouts.
It isn’t individuality that catches my attention; it is uniformity.
I find myself wondering when beauty quietly shifted from expressing personality to following a template, and what message it sends to our daughters when the very women we hold up as empowered role models often appear to conform to such rigid aesthetic norms.
Many of these young women are likely future lawyers, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. These retail jobs are simply a stepping stone as they work toward ambitious futures.
They possess intelligence, discipline, and enormous potential. Yet I can’t help wondering what my daughter sees when she looks at them.
Does she see intelligent young women with unique personalities and ambitions? Or does she see a beauty template she believes she must one day become? That is what troubles me.
Not the women themselves, but the possibility that their individuality is being overshadowed by an increasingly uniform ideal of beauty — one that quietly risks teaching the next generation that appearance is still a woman’s greatest currency.
This picture suggests that even in spaces of professional accomplishment, a woman’s appearance can still overshadow her intellect.
We say we want to empower girls. But what if we’ve confused empowerment with presentation? What if, instead of teaching them that their greatest strengths are their intellect, creativity, and character, we’ve built a culture that rewards how they look before it notices who they are?
The price of admission
It is easy to get lost in these massive cultural questions, but for me, they all collided back into a single, devastating reality on a random Saturday. A couple of weeks later, I took my daughter out to her favorite sushi bar. I kept things light, just joking around, and we started discussing the songs she likes.
She is so deeply into musicals; she can recite every single song from Hamilton and Epic: The Musical by heart, and she can play them all on the piano. It is such a powerful image: a girl who can memorize and play entire complex musicals by heart, yet she’s hiding inside giant hoodies.
Sitting there at the sushi bar, she finally opened up to me; she told me about what had actually happened in the basement at that birthday party.
She had gone downstairs because she simply wanted to play a game on the PlayStation with the boys. Instead, one of them looked at her and said, though I’ve softened his words because I still can’t bring myself to repeat what he actually told her: “If you want to play, you have to show your breasts.”
I was completely stumped. The question hadn’t come from a kid you would expect to act like that. This was a boy I would never, in a million years, have pinned as someone who would say something so degrading.
He was just like my daughter, a promising kid on a scholarship path, incredibly well-mannered, and very well-spoken. His parents are people I have known for the past twenty-five years, the kind of family you trust implicitly.
As the initial shock and anger washed over me, a second, darker realization took its place: I was horrified, but on the other hand, I wasn’t surprised at all. Because this isn’t just a crisis of what we are doing to our girls; it is a crisis of what we are doing to our boys.
We look at a well-behaved, intelligent thirteen-year-old boy and assume he is safe from these toxic currents. But he is growing up in the very same digital culture as my daughter.
As I replayed that moment in my mind, one question kept haunting me: Where on earth does a thirteen-year-old learn that a girl’s body is the price of admission to a video game?
Nobody teaches that lesson in school. No loving parent sits a child down and says, “A girl’s body is something to bargain for.” Yet somehow, somewhere, that idea found its way into his thinking.
The grim future of the transactional landscape
If you want to see the logical conclusion of what happens when children are raised in this environment, you only have to look slightly ahead at the generations just entering adulthood.
My older daughter, now 21, has shared countless stories about the hidden corners of Snapchat and Discord, describing what passes for a “love language” among her peers these days: a hyper-digitized, transactional landscape where intimacy is treated like a commodity, and boundaries are treated like negotiation points.
The tragedy is that this conversation is often framed as though only girls are paying the price. They are not.
If girls are increasingly taught that beauty and body are their greatest currency, what are boys being taught? What exactly are they supposed to value when nearly every platform rewards appearance above character?
I recently spoke to my twenty-five-year-old nephew. His frustration wasn’t directed at women; it was directed at the culture surrounding modern dating.
His perception was that dating had become entirely performative — that expensive restaurants, luxury experiences, and social-media-worthy lifestyles had become expectations before two people had even had the chance to know one another.
You can see the exact logic behind his frustration playing out all over social media right now. Scrolling through my feed, I keep coming across videos of young women looking directly into the camera, explaining why a man should always pay for dinner on a date.
Their reasoning is strikingly similar: “Do you have any idea how much money and time I put into this look just to show up?”
They list the cost of the skincare, the hair appointments, the makeup, the outfit, and the hours spent getting ready. These women aren’t acting out of malice; they are simply responding to the marketplace they’ve been handed. They have internalized the lesson that their appearance is an investment, and paying for dinner is simply the price of admission.
But when millions of young people watch these videos, they absorb a devastating message: that relationships begin with a transaction rather than a conversation.
We live in a Western culture that speaks constantly about female empowerment. Everywhere you turn, girls are told they can become anything, lead anything, and achieve anything. It is a message I genuinely want my daughters to hear. But while our words celebrate girls for their limitless potential, the marketplace surrounding them seems endlessly preoccupied with their appearance.
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The World: Your mind has no limits.
The Market: Perfect your face first.
As a mother, I can’t help but wonder which message my daughters hear the loudest. The currency might change as they get older, but the equation remains identically cold: Show your body, and the reward is admission to the game. And vice versa.
Have we unintentionally created a culture that tells young women they must be flawlessly polished and endlessly desirable, while simultaneously telling young men they must be successful enough to afford the expectations that culture has created?
If those become the currencies of modern relationships — beauty on one side, financial status on the other — what room is left for curiosity, kindness, humour, loyalty, or simply enjoying one another’s company?
Putting the pieces together
When I look back over the past months, I realize that none of these moments frightened me on their own. Not the oversized hoodie. Not the song. Not the birthday party. Not my older daughter’s stories about Snapchat, nor my nephew’s quiet frustration with modern dating. Not even my twelve-year-old asking for adult skincare.
It was seeing them together that really unsettled me. One by one, they began to feel less like isolated incidents and more like pieces of the same puzzle, all pointing in the same direction.
That is what finally forced me to ask a question I never expected to ask as a mother: What exactly are we teaching our children that human worth looks like?
There are no easy answers to that question, but the weight of it follows me into the quiet spaces of my day.
I still think about that drive to school. A brilliant twelve-year-old girl sat beside me — maybe a future architect, a pianist who can play entire musicals from memory, a student on a scholarship path.
Yet the words echoing through the speakers insisted that her greatest currency wasn’t her mind. It was her body.
If that is the message reaching our daughters before they have even entered high school — and if our sons are learning to see girls through that very same transactional lens — then perhaps we need to stop asking whether we are empowering our children.
Perhaps we should start asking a very different question: What exactly have we taught them about what empowerment looks like?
Sanya Jovanovic is a nonfiction essayist and cultural commentator whose work explores the raw complexities of personal history, family dynamics, trauma, and the spectrum of human nature. Her essays have been featured by publications including Fourth Wave, and she writes regularly on Medium.
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This article was originally published at Medium. Reprinted with permission from the author.
